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Introducing Tentative Scheduling in Accelo — a new way to plan upcoming projects directly from the Quote stage. Estimate timelines, assign teams, and review resourcing impacts in the Scheduling Dashboard, all before a deal is closed.
Why wait until a contract is signed to see how a project will affect your team? Tentative Scheduling gives you early visibility into project demands, so you can understand the impact on timelines, capacity, and profitability while the opportunity is still in play.
This means smarter staffing decisions, fewer last-minute surprises, and more consistent client delivery. For operations leaders, it’s a game-changer: proactive planning replaces reactive scrambling, and your entire pipeline becomes easier to manage.
With a more unified view of both confirmed and potential work, your team can align sooner, prioritize effectively, and deliver with greater confidence, even before the Quote is won.
See Tentative Scheduling in Action
Watch a quick overview to discover how tentative scheduling gives you clear visibility into upcoming workload, helps you balance priorities early, and sets the stage for smoother project delivery.
Whether you're in sales, operations, or project management, this feature helps you eliminate the guesswork so you can align teams earlier, spot resource conflicts before they derail delivery, and plan with confidence.
With tentative scheduling, you can map out how a new project will affect your team’s availability, including both inflight and upcoming work. This gives you a clear picture of resource requirements before a quote is accepted, so you can avoid overbooking, adjust timelines in advance, and ensure successful project outcomes across your portfolio.
This means no more reactive planning or having to “make it work” after deals close. Instead, you can proactively set your team up for success, knowing in advance if you'll need to shift existing commitments or bring in additional support. It's all about protecting delivery quality and employee well-being.
With tentative scheduling, users can now provisionally schedule work before it's confirmed. This gives teams early insight into how upcoming opportunities may affect workload and resourcing, making it easier to balance priorities, avoid bottlenecks, and set realistic expectations.
This also empowers leadership to make more strategic go/no-go decisions. If capacity is too tight or timelines are unrealistic, you can address it upfront, not after client expectations are set. For firms juggling multiple projects or recurring work, this means fewer compromises, more predictable revenue collection, and sustained profitability.
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Optional Start Dates for Quotes
Assign a Start Date when creating or editing a Quote. This enables the tentative scheduling capabilities and ensures the Quote appears on the Scheduling Dashboard.
Estimate your delivery roadmap right from the start, giving stakeholders early visibility into what’s ahead, so everyone’s aligned from Quote to kickoff.
Enhanced Quote Details
Quotes display estimated start and end dates, along with clear visibility of the Quote’s current status.
No more digging or guesswork. Sales, delivery, and management teams can all see quote timelines and status in one place, improving handoffs and cross-team communication.
Create Tentative Schedules via Estimates
Apply project or milestone templates directly within the Quote Estimate screen to automatically build out a full delivery schedule. This schedule is generated from your pre-defined template, no extra effort required, and sets the foundation for what your team will see in the Scheduling Dashboard. Once dates are added, a Gantt chart with date fields will populate, allowing for timeline adjustments.
Save hours of manual effort by applying your tried-and-true project templates. This lets your team hit the ground running when a project is greenlit, with a timeline already in place.
Access Schedules from the Quote View
View or edit the tentative schedule directly from the Quote view, for quick and easy schedule adjustments.
Make real-time adjustments without jumping between modules or systems. Whether you're a sales lead or project manager, having this access streamlines collaboration and shortens the time from proposal to project start.
Quotes Displayed in the Scheduling Dashboard
Use the Work view to see how upcoming Quotes impact your timeline, and the Team view to assess how tentative work affects team capacity — so you can plan both delivery and staffing with confidence.
See how new business will actually affect delivery. Instead of relying on gut feel, you’ll have hard data about upcoming workload, allowing for more proactive hiring, load balancing, and project sequencing.
Review Utilization with Tentative Allocations
A Team view provides visibility into tentative assignments when calculating resource utilization, helping you plan capacity more accurately.
This means fewer surprises down the road. You can spot resource constraints before they become blockers, avoid employee burnout, and make smarter decisions about when to take on more work or when to pump the brakes.
Intuitive Dashboard Key
Quickly toggle tentative work on or off in the dashboard to isolate its impact on utilization. With color-coded indicators, it’s easy to distinguish active from upcoming work at a glance, and make informed staffing decisions.
This flexible view helps you scenario-plan like a pro. Want to see the worst-case impact of closing three big deals at once? Toggle tentative work on. Need to prioritize guaranteed work instead? Toggle it off. It’s the control center for confident capacity forecasting.
Seamless Quote-to-Project Conversion
When a Quote is accepted, the associated tentative schedule and budget automatically convert to an active Project, reducing duplicate effort and preserving your planned timeline.
Say goodbye to the rework trap. Instead of recreating schedules or losing valuable estimates, your team can pick up exactly where the sales process left off, ensuring a faster, smoother project kickoff with minimal admin overhead.
Tentative scheduling is available for Advanced and Premium customers. This exciting functionality gives you a greater unified view of all active and upcoming work across your teams, so you can better understand the resourcing needs required to deliver every project — today and in the future.
With clearer insight into your pipeline and operations, your team can drive more consistent revenue, protect profit margins, and build stronger client trust. Whether you're scaling fast or simply trying to improve internal workflows, tentative scheduling helps you operate with more foresight and fewer surprises.
Request a demo of tentative scheduling today to learn how you can gain greater confidence, clarity, and control into your delivery pipeline and planning process.
